Buster Posey was injured one year ago, but hits like Scott Cousins' are less celebrated than they were three decades ago.

It was a year ago today that Scott Cousins ran over Buster Posey. That was such an obnoxious thing, I'm sure we can all agree. Support collisions fine, don't support collisions fine, but we can all support Buster Posey and bipedal locomotion.

Gary Carter's greatest moment in baseball was not any single hit or play, but just saying "Yes" at the right time.

By this morning you have no doubt read countless stories about Gary Carter, his playing career, and his character both on and off the field. The links came flying furiously yesterday, because his passing had been a foregone conclusion for quite awhile. Sadly, in our business that means not only sorrow and sympathy but getting a head start on writing the obituary.

There was extra incentive to start early on Carter, because in this case there are no crocodile tears; he was an important and beloved figure in at least two baseball towns and a legitimate Hall of Famer (for more on this aspect of Carter’s career, see Jay Jaffe’s piece elsewhere on the site). His career .262/.335/.439 rates don’t look like much in our offensively bloated era, but he played in a difficult park at a more austere time. At his peak, which lasted (roughly) from 1977 through 1985, Carter hit .276/.349/.478. Give that a park and era adjustment and maybe grant the Kid a few points of production for the wear and tear of catching, and you have a real star. His OPS+ for those years was 129, his TAv about .300. That is to say nothing of his strong defensive abilities.

I don’t want to focus on Carter’s on-field achievements today, but of the crucial moment of team-building in which he played a key role. That was the day he was traded from the Expos to the Mets. This far removed, it is difficult to remember that the Expos were once a legitimate baseball team, not the bastard stepchild of MLB, existing to make salary-dumping deals such as that which sent John Wetteland to the Yankees for the immortal Fernando Seguignol and bundles of greenback dollars.

Another year of balloting in the STATLG-L/Baseball Prospectus Internet Hall of Fame has been completed, and it's time to report on the results. As expected, and as will almost certainly be announced tomorrow in Cooperstown, Eddie Murray was elected in his first year of eligibility. For the second straight year, our voters also supported National League catcher Gary Carter with enough votes to put The Kid's smiling face on a plaque. Once again, we'll have to wait a day to see whether the Baseball Writers Association of America see as much in Carter as we do; in last year's BBWAA balloting, he fell short by a mere 11 votes. Bert Blyleven and newcomer Ryne Sandberg came close to 75% in the STATLG-L vote, but none of the other 29 players on the ballot received votes from as many as half of us.

A total of 3558 voters cast ballots this season, topping last year's count by more than 1000. Thank you all! The rise in popularity of the IHOF vote has been amazing - from 518 to 3558 voters in just four years. The threshold for induction was therefore 2669 votes, which Murray and Carter topped by nearly 300. Blyleven and Sandberg fell about 250 votes below the bar. The mean number of names on a ballot was 5.96, well above last year's 5.18 but less than the 6.54 names per ballot the previous year.